About

History

Knowm Inc. exists to lead the computing industry toward neuromemristive processors. Our roots were planted in 2002, when lead inventor Alex Nugent began patenting his ideas around adaptive computing architectures and founded an intellectual property holding company called KnowmTech LLC with partners. Initial seed funding for the endeavor was made possible by business woman and entrepreneur, Hillary Riggs. Intellectual property services were provided by patent attorneys Kermit Lopez and Luis Ortiz. The IP portfolio spans memristive components and circuits all the way to large scale neuromorphic architectures.

After his proposed seedling pitch to DARPA to build an artificial synapses from nanoparticles was morphed into a full-scale DARPA program in 2007, Alex co-created and advised the DARPA SyNAPSE program. From 2011 to late 2018 Alex was awarded multiple government SBIR and STTR contracts to further develop knowm memristor computing technology.

In 2012, Tim Molter, joined the effort to lead software development and further design chip architectures with Alex. Alex and Tim published the formal introduction to AHaH computing in early 2014: AHaH Computing–From Metastable Switches to Attractors to Machine Learning.

In 2015 Knowm partnered with memristor fabrication pioneer Kris Campbell, Ph.D. from Boise State University, inventor of the Self Directed Channel (SDC) Memristor. Investor and consultant Sam Barakat joined the team to help launch Knowm Inc.

In 2018 AHaH Computing was proven feasible with Knowm SDC Memristors on the open-source Memristor Discovery platform.

In 2019, as suspicions of poor oxide memristor shelf life grow, Knowm memristors have passed four years of shelf-life testing and have been shipped to researchers in over forty countries. The discovery of the optically gated transistor leads to a memristor-photonics interface breakthrough, simplifying the design and fabrication of general-purpose memristor neural network processors with optical interfaces.

In 2020, CEO Alex Nugent builds a shared-access kT-RAM Server hosting hundreds of crossbars at his home during COVID lockdown.